The Tech Museum sits in the heart of Silicon Valley, the tech-based business mecca of California. With over 250 hands-on exhibits in five themed galleries, The Tech Museum's goal is to inspire the innovator within each visitor. Exhibits include piloting a robotic dog, floating in a space-age jet pack, designing roller coasters, producing movies, creating webpages, controlling computer-generated avatars, understanding power as generated by natural resources, and more.

The museum also houses the Hackworth IMAX Dome Theater, a theater with an eight-story high screen showing amazing movies in crystal clear visual and auditory qualities. The schedule of movies is listed on The Tech Museum's site.

Effective July 1, 2011, The Tech Museum has new admission pricing. Admission includes one free IMAX movie viewing; additional movie tickets may be purchased for $5. For free admission days, please click here.

Hours of operation: Daily, 10am - 5pm; closed only on December 25. Information on parking is available here.

A number of special events occur throughout the year, including sleepovers, scout offerings, and summer camps. For a full listing of special events, please visit the museum's Youth and Family Programs page.

1 Reviews

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missbirdie

5

Reviewed on 06/20/2011

The Tech Museum is by far one of the best museums in Northern California. If your child is even remotely into science and technology, add this to your must do list and push it right to the top.
The super-duper innovative exhibits begin before visitors even walk through the front door. A giant marble run, with twists, turns, drops and lifts wowed us at the museum entrance.
Once we were inside and squared up with admission, we were faced with a tough choice: upstairs or down? We headed upstairs and had a ball learning about how people are catching fog in Africa and turning it into drinking water, how knee and hip replacements occur, why laparoscopic surgery is beneficial, and more. The kids were sucked into the Silicon Valley Innovation Gallery, where microchips and computers are explored, Google Earth became a virtual space ride, and touch screens allowed them to "throw" patterns and colors onto huge digital displays.
After eating lunch in the Primavera Café, a small cafeteria offering fairly typical attraction foods, we headed downstairs to a floor of robots, space toys and a mini city in need of an energy boost. The robotic dog (Sony's AIBO) was a hit with the kids, as were the other robotic toys in the Bots exhibit. As a parent, I loved the Green By Design exhibit, which demonstrated how important renewable energy and energy-efficient products are in every day life.
The staff here was extremely helpful and I was amazed at how patient and kind the docents were. My child was asked questions that were relevant to the exhibits and the docents were genuinely interested in getting the children to come up with an answer on their own.
We could have easily spent the entire day at the Tech. The hands-on exhibits were amazingly designed, allowing a younger child to glean what they could and an older child to really delve into the topic. ...more